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attributes of a civilized people is a belief that good will be rewarded and evil will be punished.
In 1781, Jefferson said the following words, which are engraved on the Jefferson Memorial in Washington: “God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nationbe secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?”
I wonder what Jefferson would think of the ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California that the word “God” is unconstitutional in the Pledge of Allegiance. I also wonder what ol’ Tom would think of the American Civil Liberties Union suing school districts all over the country to ban the use of the word “God” in school-sanctioned speech. Here’s how ridiculous this whole thing is: At McKinley High School in Honolulu, an official school poem has been recited on ceremonial occasions since 1927 . One of the lines mentions a love for God. After the ACLU threatened a lawsuit, that poem was banned from public recitation, a seventy-five-year tradition dissolved within a few weeks.

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This is tragic insanity. To any intellectually honest person, it is apparent that the Founders wanted very much to keep God in the public arena, even uppermost in the thoughts of the populace. What the Founders did not want was any one religion imposed by the government. Jefferson, and Madison in particular, were suspicious of organized religion and of some of the zealots who assumed power infaith-based organizations. But the Founders kept it simple: All law-abiding religions were allowed to practice, but the government would not favor any one above another.
At the same time, Jefferson in his wisdom predicted that some of the things he and the others wanted for the new country would eventually come under fire. On September 6, 1819, he wrote: “The Constitution … is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please.”
How prophetic is that?

[The ACLU’s] true agenda is a secular society. So my question is: Where are the countersuits? Where are the voices of opposition to secularism? Right now they are found primarily on the Christian right, which has been demonized, pardon the pun, as fanatically extreme because of its tendency to condemn its opposition to hellfire. Believe me, I know. Many letters to The Factor give me clear road maps to the devil’s den—and suggest I’m headed there.
The unrecognized bitter truth about God and America is that organized religion is scared. The churches don’t want to say anything that might endanger their tax-exempt status. They stay out of politics; they actively practice the doctrine of separation of church and state. But that doesn’t mean that good people who believe in the presence of public spirituality have to stay out of the fray. As the Isley Brothers sang, “Fight the Power.”

Nowhere is the civil impotence of religion in the USA better demonstrated than by the Catholic Church. A whopping 65 million Americans are Catholics, almost 25 percent of the population. Yet the Catholic Church in America, which used to be a tremendous force for effective social change, is now on the defensive and, in many quarters, is an object of public derision.
Do you know why? Because the Catholic Church stopped looking out for the folks, that’s why. Its leadership is made up primarily of elderly white men who have spent their lives playing politics and currying favor with the conservative zealots in the Vatican. Cardinal Law in Boston, Cardinal Mahony in Los Angeles, and Cardinal Egan in New York are all men of guile, power players who enjoy their wealth and influence. I could list scores of bishops who play the same kind of callous game—that is, amassing power and money while completely forgetting the mission that Jesus died to promote.
[And there’s more. On January 21, 2013, after continuing pressure from potential prosecutors and litigants, the Los